


Endarken

by bandaran



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fluff and Smut, M/M, Magical Stiles Stilinski, Nemeton, POV Derek Hale, lots of death, wolf feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-24
Packaged: 2018-05-27 23:24:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 9
Words: 15,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6304291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bandaran/pseuds/bandaran
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He had come and gone unseen. He had left no scent. He wasn’t a Spark anymore. He was an Inferno. </p><p>This fic is complete.</p><p>Once you're done, check out the companion fic written from Stiles' POV!<br/><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/works/6391183">Enlighten</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**One**.

What drove him to go? The same thing that always pushes him away, far into the reaches of that black, dark well.

Away.

It’s not so much a conscious thought, not anymore. Growing too close, roots burying too deep, deep as the Hales, that is why he had – _had_ – to leave. The feeling bristled after the first year and grew worse, became a spreading sickness turning him hot and cold until finally, without plan, without forethought he looked at each of them and he _left_.

It was good. It felt right. Right? Like the dull throb of a closing wound. Walking away gave back control in a way he had forgotten he could have it. Not even anger, not even the wolf made him feel as powerful as being able to cut and go. To convince himself he could go at any time and regret nothing, think nothing of those watching wide eyed and broken in his wake.

He left again, but this did not drag on, not like before. This was six months of hot sun and amber beer and sex until it wasn’t. Until it was pointless. There was no devastation that he could see in her beautiful eyes; she could never be devastated by someone like him. That was good. That made him hate himself. She could have ruined him.

They all could have.

This time it felt right to leave their world completely.

Instinct pumped thickly in his veins as he stood on the outskirts of the Yukon, a vast track of wilderness, of emerald spires and crystal lakes and nothing and everything. The wolf sang in his skull at the sight. His eyes drifted closed as the beast commanded and when they opened the shined with cerulean ghosts.

This shift felt like his last.

The last True Shift and no more leaving.


	2. Chapter 2

******Two**.

 

Many winters cross his valley. Winters no wolf should be able to survive.

He never sees a single human.

He forgets them.

 

The wolf’s dream wakens him in the daylight. The shift is gone as he blinks, squinting in the glaring sun down on long pronged hands. Human hands. His hands. The dream of howling, cold and desperate still echoes in his thoughts. He knows that howl. It's the same howl he had screamed at the smoking shell of his scorched life.

It was over.

What had he done?

How? _How?_

Breathing comes shallow, he can’t breathe at all and then the anger coats him in a fine dust and he _hates_ himself. He destroys his den. He rips apart plants and rocks and slashes the earth until the whole thing caves in and he is nearly buried alive.

 

Faculties return slowly. Words come back to him after two days of hiking. Walking on two legs takes longer. Because walking is just falling and wolves don’t fall.

The wolf tries to resurface, thrashing against the insides of his bones, snarling, but he does not give in. He has to stay human. Has to keep control. Has to follow the howl.

 

The road is foreign under his feet. He knows it is a road, something he may not have known if he had come to it any sooner. He walks along it, bare feet kicking up gravel off the shoulder. As he walks, memories also slide into place. They were always there, but obscured by fogged glass and walled away by the temperance of the unbridled force of hunt and survive.

They muddled together. The picture of a human life. Of a wolf life. Fear and pain and sadness.

 _Guilt_.

Eyes. Eyes clear and dark as citrine. Eyes determined and quick as a wolf’s, but so painfully human. So fragile if he knew where to look. Those eyes marked each memory and the scent that remained when they were gone – it makes him shake now, as he remembers it, shake with rage as it flowers over his skin at what he’s done. A scent like blood and oak and wildness.

The last time he had smelled it, it had been the only thing that could have stopped him running. It was the most terrifying part of all, the thing the made him run for his life to get away.

 

He walks into the diner.

The hum of conversation, of forks and knives scritching against plates, the slop of burnt coffee into cups comes to a slow halt. The rough folk of this town dressed a worn flannels and ball caps stare at him like he is the culmination of all madness in the world. He had forgotten what he should feel when being stared at so blatantly. Annoyance was the first flicker in his mind. He meets their stares and most turn away.

A waitress sidles up to him with caution scribbled on her face. The others watch intently, some hands falling to gun strapped belts.

“Honey?” asks the waitress, “Where did you come from?” Her eyeshadow is very blue and bold. Stereotypical of a place like this. She smells artificial, wrapped up in a sour cloud of hairspray and makeup and cheap perfume.

“I need to use your phone,” he says.

She nods dismissively, “Darl’n, I’ll call whoever you need, but we gotta cover you up.” She whispers the last part.

He looks the length of his body and back at the woman. He had forgotten humanity’s determination to deny all that is natural about themselves. He used to run the whole of the Preserve naked, flanked by his pack on all sides, free. As the memory bubbles up he squeezes his eyes closed and sets his jaw, willing it away.

Finally, he nods at her.

She skips behind the counter. When she returns she has a dirty old towel scrunched in her hands. It _wreaks_. He holds it around his waist as she guides him to a less occupied section of the dining room and sits him in a booth.

“Baby, you are just filthier then a greasy monkey,” she chortles, pulling a cell phone from her apron, “Where’d you wander out of?”

It takes a moment for him to realize she expects an answer and a moment longer to remember that he doesn’t give answers to anything. She sighs at the sight of his vacant expression and hands over her phone.

“You want anything to eat?”

Hunger churns his stomach. His human stomach that has nothing crouching in it but voles and tubers. He mulls over this, but isn’t sure if he can eat without ripping whatever he is brought apart with his teeth and pitching a growl at anyone that eyes him.

He shakes his head.

“Well, let me know if you change your mind,” she taps the name tag on her shirt, “I’m Violet.”

He nods, clutching the phone. When she does not leave, he offers steadily, “Derek.”

This satisfies her and she trots back to the door to greet a new set of bent looking patrons.

He keys the only number he can remember.

The phone picks up before the playback ring can complete. “Hello?” comes the instant response. The heart beat on the other end is slamming down, so fast it must be painful.

“Cora, I-,”

“Oh my god,” she nearly sobs and he doesn’t know how to react to so much rawness in her voice. He doesn’t remember her ever falling to pieces, not once. “Oh my fucking god,” she breathes, and he can hear her sit down, a chair screeching out beneath her. “Derek, holy shit.”

At the mention of his name he hears other voices rise up in a cadence that makes his heart simper.

“Cora,” he says around the constriction in his throat. He forces away the agony, the need to hang up and run. “I need you to send me some money.” Small tasks. Small steps.

“Shit, obviously,” she snaps, and that is the tone he needs to hear, “Fucking obviously – someone get me a fucking pen – tell me where you are.” She is stern, taking control, but even still the slight quaver remains and he knows her hands are shaking, that she’ll have to make someone else write everything down.

“I’m in Fairbanks,” he says calmly, trying to help her match his tone, to reinforce what she already knows: that this is not the time to fall apart. “The numbers to my accounts are in the Vault.”

“Ok, the Vau-, ISAAC,” she snarls and unintelligible yelling filters mutedly down the line, “Jesus, ok, in the Vault. Give me an hour. We’ll, uh, hang on – Google Western Unions in Fairbanks,” a pause as someone, some specter that is still not real, does as she asks and then, “Ok, I’ll wire it to you. You can pick it up at 1200 Noble Street.”

“Thank you.”

“Der,” she’s walking, footsteps following her, keys jingling, “you need to hurry.”


	3. Chapter 3

**Three**.

 

He is still suppressing. Still holding it all down, every drop trying to flood him, to destroy him. He moves, does what he must, any spare thoughts or emotions not pertinent to the task, to getting him to California, are cast off. He doesn’t ask Cora what she meant. He doesn’t ask her why she is in Beacon Hills. Or why Isaac is. Because he doesn’t need to know, not yet. Possibly not ever.

 

He throws up in the airport bathroom after touching down. His automatic, robotic mind had been calling out commands and his body obeying until suddenly the trance is broken. Sweat breaks out over his palms and chest and he is huddled over a toilet, vomiting. The stench of so many bodies and industrial cleaners bring tears to his eyes, but he has no choice but to wait until his retching stops.

It isn’t sickness. He has never been sick a day in his life.

 

Shaky, he washes his face with cold water and digs through his bag for his tooth brush. The man next to him at the sinks, grinding an electric trimmer over his jaw gives him a friendly shrug. A silent, _Travel, what can you do, eh?_

As Derek finishes brushing his teeth, he catches himself in the mirror. He had cleaned up a little at his hotel before the flight. Shaved his beard down to a length that felt familiar, showered off the inch of grit and dirt caking his skin and trimmed his hair and nails. All of this, it made him feel more human, quieted the wolf, but the man in the glass still looks absolutely feral.

 

The cab drops him at the out skirts of town. He absently shoves a wad of cash into the driver’s hand, at which she sputters, but he is already drifting to the boundary line.

In the dusk he sees that he is not alone on the road. A single figure leans on the hood of…. He doesn’t smile, but feels the ache that would have become one when he was younger.

Scott McCall pushes himself up straight from the Camaro, huge grin on his face. It was not what he had expected. He had expected nothing. Nothing and then fury on all sides. He should have known better than to think Scott would be anything other than relieved. Scott trots the rest of the way and drags Derek into a hug.

“Holy shit,” he laughs, “Dude, where the fuck have you been?”

Derek hugs back and the tension in his body melts away. Clichés play through his mind on a gray movie reel. How it's like he’d never left. How their past differences meant nothing. How it felt right to come home.

“Alaska,” Derek answers when Scott holds him back by his shoulders. He hasn’t grown much since Derek last saw him and he still has that goodness clinging to him. Goodness Derek used to mistake for naivety.

Scott punches his shoulder, “Fucking Alaska? What’s your life, man? _Call of the Wild_?”

“For a while, yeah.”

“Shit, dude, that’s savage _as fuck_ ,” Scott says sobering a little. Of course he’s read _Call of the Wild_. He digs into his coat pocket, and Derek notes after a moment, that he’s wearing a leather jacket. Scott produces the car keys and dangles them.

“You wanna drive?” he asks enticingly.

Derek feels his brow hitch. He rolls his eyes and snatches the keys.

 

“Is that a burger wrapper?” Derek asks, revving the engine. He glares at Scott, who shrinks back into his seat.

“I didn’t know when your plane landed, dude, I got hungry.”

“You ate in the car. Then you threw to the wrapper in the floor?” he asks mildly, shifting into gear. The Camaro purrs softly, vibrations going through his bones. The only feeling that came close to sprinting through the forest on four paws was driving this car. The nostalgia was enough to ebb his irritation at the garbage.

Scott swipes up his mess and the empty coke bottle in the cup holder and chucks them out the window. As long as it’s not in the car, Derek can’t be prevailed upon enough to care.

He guns it. His baby spits up gravel, tearing, roaring to life as she screams down the abandoned highway. Night eats up the sky, descending their path in darkness. It’s wilderness at the border. No street lamps. County dark, but both of them can see the bending road in high clarity, their eyes burning with wolf spirit.

“Why am I here?” Derek asks when the excitement plateaus.

“I called you, dude,” Scott says, fiddling with his phone. He pockets it and scratches his neck. “I, uh, I thought you’d know, actually. You know more wolf stuff than I do.”

“You howled?” guesses Derek and Scott nods. Scott. Scott, a True Alpha, the first in a century, had called out to his pack so profoundly, Derek had heard it in his mind. Heard it and been forced from the True Shift even over thousands of miles. The True Alpha spirit was a cut diamond, one born in millions, but one that could perform such a feat? That wasn’t rare. It was prophetic.

“It brought the others?” asks Derek, considering his next words carefully.

“Yeah,” Scott sounds embarrassed, but the tone doesn’t touch his scent like it did when he was a teenager. “You aren’t the only one that showed up,” he says, “actually you’re the last one.”

Derek meets his eyes briefly, “How many?”

Scott gives a dry laugh like he’s not comfortable with what he’s done, “The whole pack, dude. Everyone.”

“Cora wasn’t in your pack.”

“I don’t know how it works, really, I just…,” he shakes head, looks out the window. The sound of that howl, that reality defying howl, cries out again in his memories. It’s a mournful plea that someone come, someone help. So full of desperation that it drew in every wolf Scott has ever met. Derek has an inkling that it may not just be wolves that started pouring in Beacon Hills judging from the look of Scott’s face.

“It’s called a Spirit Cry,” he doesn’t know if this information, if giving the thing a name, will help Scott come to terms with it, “it’s a transcendent howl. My mother told me that a long time ago, with the arrival of European wolves in the Americas the native packs had to devise a unique method of communication to warn each of danger or to call for help. One enemy packs couldn’t hear or copy. It was only used in times of extreme duress, only when a pack faced extinction or worse.”

Just a story for children. But then, weren’t they all?

They drive awhile in silence.

“What happened, Scott?”

Scott rubs his eyes. Salt water comes away from them, but he doesn’t cry.

“It… I wish you’d been here, man,” he sniffs, gaze fixed out the windshield, but he isn’t angry, he’s defeated, “Everything just, it-it broke apart. He’s gone.”

Derek grips the steering wheel, shutting his mind, snapping it like a steel trap.

“He’s - I don’t even know,” he sighs heavily, “Once Ethan showed up out of nowhere and then Kira texted me from New York saying she was getting on a plane and, just, everyone started pouring in, I knew you’d come too. I didn’t want to say anything until you got here.”

“Why?”

“I mean, I’m an Alpha, but you were born a wolf. I can’t fix this on my own, dude. But I have to show you, you have to look into my mind. If I explain, I’ll mess something up, get something wrong.”

 

Derek pulls off onto the shoulder, because Scott can’t wait anymore. He prefers not to do this with distractions anyway. Too many scents and questions and angry eyes would make him miss something.

Scott, bends over the hood of the car, hands resting on the hood.

“You’re sure?” Derek asks, in warning. But Scott knows this pain. He knows the feeling of fire replacing the blood in his veins; of a consciousness not his own prying into his skull.

“Do it,” he says, face tightened into a grimace.

Derek throws out his claws and drives the razor ends into the back of Scott’s neck. His skin gives and blood hotly curls into Derek’s nail beds. The wolf rushes down his arm, galloping into Scott’s waiting pool of memory.

The waters undulate and burst into still lifes around him. Images of frozen time, thousands, millions of shining stars. He smells the air and chemo-signals wafting from each, wandering as he pulls in scents.

_Blood and oak and wildness._

It permeates every inch, a soul bound tightly to the mind he walks. Each way he turns it’s there, teasing. Laughing. He whips around and catches sight of a figure darting between memories. It’s vanished into smoke.

Gone.

He finds the memory. The one Scott needs to show him, but resists revealing even now. The wolf picks up speed and springs on the glowing vestige. Derek tumbles into the memory, the wolf falling away.

 

It’s raining.

It’s night.

Water pelts the trees and stirs the ground into slop. The Nemeton raises into the clearing. The stump all that remains of an immense spiritual and natural power. An omen that haunted Derek’s dreams even while devoured by the True Shift. Its low shadow mars the ground regardless of the absence of moonlight.

Lydia, soaked, grips the Nemeton where she is fallen over it. She’s screaming, unable to stand, but everything about her is drowned out by the memory. She was here, but isn’t exactly what Scott remembers.

Scott is thrown to the ground at Derek’s feet. He wants to shift, to defend himself, but he can’t. He can’t bring himself to harm his best friend. His brother.

Stiles grabs him by the shirt front, rainwater careening down his face, his hair soaked through and plastered to his forehead. He shakes Scott savagely. Scott’s never seen Stiles look like this. Never.

Derek takes a step back.

He doesn’t recognize anything about this person either. There’s something wrong with him. Scott smelled it in the memory, the change in scent, the pitted odor coming off him wreathed with what both of them did know. An electric smell, like a wire right before it....

Derek sinks to his haunches, watching the struggle as objectively as he can muster. Even then he thinks of his own memories and they drag, bleeding into this one. Flashes of Stiles he has not allowed himself to see in five years of self-exile.

Stiles hunched over, knee deep in the engine block of his Jeep; drenched through his track suit with pool water, his face running with tears after his father’s abduction. Every little look, every snide, bratty comment, every time Derek had been able to see him working through a problem with such focus it blankets his whole expression. His huge brown eyes like drops of resin, his nose, his skin, his mouth, his voice.

His hand on Derek’s shoulder, Boyd’s corpse splayed out, blood steeping the knees of his jeans.

What had he done? What the _fuck_ had he _done_?

And now, this thing he no longer knows was towering in the mud, screaming at Scott, face contorted by something so dark it made his heart stutter.

“YOU DID THIS!” Stiles cries, hammering Scott into the ground.

“Let him go, Stiles.”

Derek knows that voice. Dark like charcoal and calm, always so composed. Chris Argent. Gun clasped in both hands, its barrel unwaveringly on Stiles’ temple.

Stiles feints at Chris, lunging like he’s going to attack and Chris pulls the trigger, because that’s what he has been trained since birth to do. The gun clicks. Stiles drops Scott. He stares into Chris’s eyes, takes a step forward. The gun clicks again. An Argents’ weapons never jam. Never.

Everything about this is so _wrong_.

Chris discards it. Latches another up from his hip holster. Pull. Click.

Stiles is on him now. Before Chris can react, Stiles has him by the throat, and something in Derek barks a weak cry. This can’t be real. Can’t.

Distantly he hears a scream. A banshee scream.

Stiles wrenches Chris in close, and Chris - paralyzed by his touch? - can do nothing, but stumble toward him. He whispers into the man’s hair a loose, breathy word, one doused in venom, he says, “ _Scared_?”

He breaks Chris’s neck.

Derek has to look away, to escape Scott’s mind, but he caused this, didn’t he? He left. He left and let Chris die, let Stiles kill him, let Scott and Lydia watch. He falls forward to his knees, helpless to do anything now, but witness just like they had to. This isn’t a fraction of the recompense he owes.

Lydia is still screaming. Her shriek rattling the air, filling it with death.

Stiles backs away, looking over his hands. Pale fingers blue with cold and trembling.

“St-iles,” Scott chokes out, unable to tear his eyes off of Chris where he is face down, unmoving. Stile keeping backing slowly to the trees, hands in his hair. He turns and bolts. He is consumed by the forest.

“STILES!” Scott yells. Breathing hard, he makes fists in the mud. He breaks apart. Just like he said. His wolf emerges. He throws his head back and the Spirit Cry curdles the wind. It shatters every single noise. It silences the rain.

 

Derek hurls himself out of Scott, panting. Hands braced on his knees.

“Dude,” Scott says carefully, “…You’re—,”

He clams up, when he thinks better of saying anything at all right now. Derek leans into his knees. He can’t fight. He can’t stop it. The long shift, it didn’t guard him from himself, it didn’t erase anything. Everything he ran from, it was still there, still able to shred him to ribbons. Tears roll in fat globs down his cheeks.

He can’t remember the last time he cried. He never let this happen. Never let anyone get this close, never gave himself a reason to feel the way he did standing at his family’s mass grave. Somehow leaving was the worst thing he could have done. Leaving what should have been his home, his pack, his mate, just because his was too selfish to stay and suffer the inevitable gashes of loving anything other than himself.

He had let them burn alone.


	4. Chapter 4

Melissa is waiting on the porch when they pull up the McCall drive way. The path to the house is brightened by fireflies gliding on the late summer air. They still make him a little uneasy. Scott mentions that after emerging from the Nemeton all those years ago, the fireflies had never quite left Beacon Hills. The McCall, Martin, Argent and Stilinski houses in particular.

Melissa treats him with the sort of tolerance, and it was just that, he had anticipated.

“They’re all inside,” she says shortly to Scott.

“Thanks, Mom,” he replies, squeezing her shoulder. Her hair a little whiter, her face a little more weathered, but Melissa is just as unshakable as Derek remembers. He may not have known her well, but kids like Scott didn’t turn out the way he did for no reason. That was enough to earn her his admiration, whether or not she ever cared for it. He imagines, miserably, that with a bottle of wine between them she and Talia would have had some _conversations_.

She does not follow them in.

As Scott had told him, everyone is there. The living room is packed tightly with standing room only. Lydia. Parrish. Liam. Kira. Isaac. Mason. Deaton. Malia. Cora. Ethan. Jackson. A few omegas by their scent and appearance, no doubt drifters that had been helped on by Scott’s kindness.

Cora crosses the room and coils around Derek, scenting him instantly like she had done when they were children. Where ever she has been these passed years it must have been sunny. She is darker and bares a few more scars. 

“Where the hell have you been?” Malia snaps tersely.

Cora gives her a warning growl, which she ignores. They were never all a formal pack and rank is unclear, complicating the presence of so many predators in one terribly small space.

“Did you,” Isaac says timidly, “finger him?” He wiggles his fingers for emphasis.

“That’s _not_ what that’s called,” Cora tells him, temper flaring.

Scott rolls his eyes and Derek replies, “Yes.”

“You wanted us to wait, Scott,” says Kira, wringing her hands, “so we did. Why are we here? Why couldn’t I resist the compulsion to come?”

Scott swallows, he says slowly, “It started with Sherriff Stilinski, he, uh, he passed a few months ago.”

Derek shoots him a look, question and horror heating the back of his neck.

“Yeah,” Scott says apologetically, “you saw what happened after. Stiles… he was at work when his dad collapsed. He’d a heart attack. You know, even though he ate right and exercised with me sometimes, he just, they said it was genetics. Not anything he could have really prevented late in life after eating and drinking the way he used to. He died before Stiles got to the hospital. He was there and then he just… wasn’t.

“He died before I could get to him to give him the bite. I don’t even know if it would have helped or if it would have killed him,” Scott shakes his head, “but for everything we know about Spark and wolves and everything, there was nothing we could do to save him.

“Most of you moved away, the pack pretty much disbanded for whatever reason. For a while it was just me and Stiles again. He got used to having everyone around. And then his dad… and everyone was gone and he sort of just – lost it. He stopped going to work and stopped taking his online classes. He crashed his Jeep. And I just, I couldn’t be there all the time to watch him. I hated seeing him like that. I found reasons to stop seeing him every day and I know I should have just gotten over myself and never left him, not even once, not ever, but I did and he disappeared….

“I called Lydia,” he says and swallows, eyes pricked with red veins, “and she came out and we started looking for him-,” he scrubbed his face.

Lydia picks up before he can force anymore out, “He was at the Nemeton,” she says, hands on hips, “he looked like he’d been there for days. We couldn’t get him to leave. I don’t think he could even hear us. He had this… red paint or something on his face and his clothes were torn up. He just laid there on the stump, not moving or talking.”

“Red paint?” Deaton interjects.

Lydia shrugs.

“Was it only on his face?”

“I don’t know, maybe?” she says tartly.

“The hell does it matter?” grumbles Jackson, irritably.

Deaton locks eyes with Derek fleetingly. The room is too emotional, saturated by it. But while the others are drowning in grief, Deaton is puzzle solving. It’s there in the keen glint of his dark eyes. He has something. Frowning, Derek gestures to the kitchen with a jut of his chin. He’s lost in the haze of this space. Giving into the terror of this moment doesn’t save Stiles, doesn’t fix the wrongs he committed. If Deaton has gleaned even the slightest idea as to what happened here, he needs to know. Right now.

They slip away. He knows how Lydia’s story finishes, he relived it with Scott and in razed him to ashes. He won’t stand to hear it told again.

 Isaac follows curiously. He’s a loyal beta, even if he doesn’t seem to realize that Derek isn’t his alpha anymore. He continually eyes Derek's neck when he thinks know one is looking. He wants to scent mark. Derek won't let him. This isn't his pack. He chose to abandon them. Chose to be an omega. Now he'll sleep in the bed he's made. 

“What’s happening?” Isaac asks as soon as the door swings shut.

Derek looks to Deaton.

“Red markings,” Deaton starts them, “appearing on the prone form of a body laid over the Nemeton? It wasn’t paint, Lydia saw.”

“There was nothing on his face in the memory,” Derek offers.

“It was Spark.”

Isaac snorts, “Stilinski has Spark?”

The withering stares he earns from both of them plasters a nervous grin on his face and he looks away.

“Spark doesn’t manifest on the skin,” Derek says.

“Not unless there’s an amplifier bringing to the surface. This is bad, Derek. The Nemeton would only draw out the Spark of another being if it meant to channel it in some way.”

“Like a sacrifice?”

“No,” Deaton itches his scalp and his eyes search the counter, “like… a guardian.”

“Why does the Nemeton need a guardian?”

“A little late, right?” Isaac puts in.

“You're thinking in tangible terms as if it is just a tree. The Nemeton is a vast, infinite consciousness. It resides on a plain other than our own, but maintains footholds in this world. It is pure energy. Simply cutting it down would not destroy it. Energy cannot be destroyed; it would just turn into something else.”

“It was weakened when it got cut down,” Derek says slowly, "and there were other Sparks in Beacon Hills around that time. Why now?"

“Yeah, Derek dated ,one.”

They turn on him again and this time Derek steps closer, puts his nose right up to Isaac’s until Isaac shrinks away, baring his teeth submissively.

“A protector can’t be forced,” Deaton explains, “it has to be someone willing to bend the knee and serve, to swear fealty. To become a Hawathiee, a child of the forest. Someone in Stiles’ place, having lost everything else, with even thimble of Spark within them could have easily be seduced by the power of the Nemeton. A pledge, even one made for the wrong reasons, is still a pledge.”

“How do we break it?”

“I don’t know that we do,” he says carefully, eyes playing over Derek’s in a soft touch, “I think he may be a special sort of guardian. He’s human, but for a time he was shadowed by a very old spirit. That sort of darkness, that corruption, it doesn’t just go away. It leaves a sort of residue on the soul. He was touched by a dark fox, but a nature spirit all the same, and the hole it left after being torn away still remains. The Nemeton will twist that void into a paladin bent to its will, perhaps even fill it to the brim with Spark. I think that if we can figure out why it sought him out, we can discern the limitations of its hold over Stiles.”

 “It’s scared,” says Isaac with a shrug.

“But scared of what, Mr. Lahey?” Deaton asks, tone prompting, more than chastising.

“Weed whackers?”

“What is it going to do to him?” Derek asks as collectedly as possible.

“I can’t say for certain. I need…,” he adjusts his shirt as he thinks, “a sample from the tree. Whatever it’s doing to Stiles it has to do using his Spark as a conductor. He has to be touching the wood for transference, so it should be charged with energy. If I can examine the wood I may be able to give you a clearer answer.”

“But you just said he’s protecting it,” Isaac points out, “regular Stilinski is harmless, but roided out, Spark, tree hugger Stilinski?”

“You’re scared of Stiles?” Derek asks wryly, shooting him a sidelong glance.

“He could _literally_ be real life Groot.”

“In that case he may be living out a childhood fantasy and we should leave him be,” Deaton says with a shrug and Derek stares at him because in decades of knowing Alan Deaton he has never once heard the man make a joke. It’s so jarring he can’t even force a laugh out, real or otherwise. Deaton’s brows raise, blandly amused by his expression, “In the living room you have a pack well over ten strong. Most of them are wolves. All of them are capable. Certainly capable enough to get close enough to the Nemeton to collect a sample. It’s the only way of discerning exactly what’s happening and why. Scott can’t lead them alone, Derek. I think you know that.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Five.**

 

“What am I supposed to call you?” whispers Liam.

“Be quiet,” Derek answers as they crawl to the grove’s edge.

“Are you, like, my Grand Wolf? Or I guess technically, you’re my Great Uncle Wolf.”

Derek whirls on him, too frustrated and roiled with anxiety to fathom why Scott’s beta is such a loud fucking moron. Especially at a time like this.

“ _Shut_ up.”

Liam rolls his eyes. Why do all wolves in this town start as petulant, useless children? He presses down on the ground scrub, and at the center of the grove rests the Nemeton. In its presence, he can feel the restless spirit within it in a way he’d not be able to in Scott’s memory. The air crackles with energy and the tang of electricity. The Beacon of Beacon Hills was barely awake when he left, just beginning to unfurl and stretch. This was beyond waking. That thing was alive.

And it knew they were here.

Deaton had warned of its senses. That it would feel them closing in. He had not been able to tell him if or how it was react to their encroachment on its resting place.

He waits for Scott to signal from across the grove. Signal that all is clear. He waits minutes. Longer than he should. He should turn Liam around, stow him in the car and come back to find Scott and the others. There is no movement around the edges where they should be hiding in pairs. Is that good or bad?

He hasn’t hunted with a large pack in fifteen years. The last time he was a little kid chasing around his mother and sisters, tripping over his own claws. He’s lost some of the senses he had learned, his ability to reach out and feel their motions, their direction.

Liam collapses behind him. He falls heavily into the brambles. He’s still breathing, heart still silently plodding. Derek scrambles out of the thicket when he smells the faint sickly sweet fume of wolfsbane laced in the air.

He hunts the trees, backing away slowly, trying to spot where the sleeping draft is emanating from. Pine needles crunch gently under his sneakers.

“He-eya Derek.”

The words he recognizes, the complacent, humorless tone, he does not. It’s too dank and cold.

He retracts his claws, realizing only now that they’ve dropped in his moment of alarm. He turns on the Nemeton, on Stiles squatting on its center, arms resting on his thighs.

He wears tatty clothes, splotched with dark sweat and mud and grass. His long fingers are stained brackish. Puckered shadows rim his eyes. Greasy, unwashed hair sticks out in unruly waves.

There are so many multitudes of things Derek needs to say all gummed up inside of him. So many missed chances he needs to make up for. But those hollow eyes on him, dejected and crushing and beautiful all at once, they don’t allow him to speak.

“We didn’t come to hurt you,” tumbles out and it sounds like he could be talking to anyone, not Stiles. Not the way he wants to, should have, talked to Stiles.

Stiles’ eyes leave him, float idly around the grove. He cocks his head. His grin is just as lifeless as his voice, “Where ya been, big guy?”

“Does it matter?”

Stiles points a knife at him, a small blade that had been tucked under his wrist, “Suppose it doesn’t, Sourwolf. You wanna know where I’ve been?”

Derek nods. He’s out of words already. Words that always run, and if they don't, they spill across people the wrong way. All of it disappears and all he can do is stare.

“I’ve been looking for you,” he points the knife at Derek’s head and winks, “I looked for you for three years before I got the hint. Der-bear’s gone for good. He done R-U-N-N-O-F-T. Years of build, of watching each other’s back, of sharp yet playful banter and all I got for my trouble’s a shit eating smirk and nothing else, not a word. Do you even remember the last thing you said to me?" He scratches his temple, rolling his eyes like he's already bored with this conversation, right when Derek is sure he won't say more he continues, “First you. You and then Malia… and Kira… and Lydia. The new pups went off to school of state, but me? I can’t even afford real college apparently. Dad makes just enough to keep us over the poverty line, too much for financial aid, not enough to put my ass through school and scholarship funds don't count saving your hometown from supernatural bads as an extracurricular. Not that I ever had time to fill out applications. 

“So I’m stuck _here_. Feeding money into that diploma mill Strayer and working at what has got to be the only video store left in existence. Plus Dad’s got a bum ticker. You of all people must know just how much a funeral costs, ay _Derek_? Except I don’t have the Hale fortune to fall back on. Flash forward five months and I decide, what the hell, lets punch this ticket early. Can’t do that either, too squeamish to try anything violent. The pills come right back up thanks to the acid reflux and no one even notices.”

“Stiles I’m –,”

“Sorry?” Stiles chuckles, “You were _it_ for me. And all you’ve got is ‘I’m sorry’? Wanna take another swing at it, _Omega_?”

Derek swallows. He says the first thing that comes to mind. Pouring over the right words is what ruined him in first place. He trusts his tong to do what his brain never lets it. Speak.

“The parking lot at the school,” he forces out brutally, “and I couldn’t think – of – of what the canima was. That look you gave me. That’s why I left Stiles. I was a posturing asshole, trying replace my dead fucking family with teenagers and even through the invincible feeling of being an alpha the look on your face, you a sixteen year old kid, that fucking look _wrecked_ me. I knew what was going to happen when I fucked everything up. Just like I always do. I should have left that night. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t leave you. And when I did, I shouldn’t have. I fucked everything up anyway without there even being anything.

“And I don’t care if you never speak to me again for what I did. I hope you don’t, because a lifetime of trying to make it up to you wouldn’t be enough. But I will be god _fucking_ damned if I let THAT _THING_ HAVE YOU!” he shouts the last part as loud as he can he it feels good.

Stiles measures him for a moment. A wide grin splits his face, “Cheese and crackers, Hale. Just a big, sad puppy after all. You think I give a shit now? You’re a fucking bad joke. You’re nothing to anyone anymore.”

And that’s when Derek understands. His fangs throb in his gums, coursing with fury. His eyes narrow, “How do you know if you’re in a dream?”

Stiles’ grin grows. “I don’t know Derek, how do you know if you’re in a dream?”

“What are you doing to him?”

The Nemeton cackles, pulling Stiles’ mouth a little wider than is natural. “Nothing worse than you've done.”

“You made him kill Chris; he’s not a killer.”

“I can’t make him do anything he doesn’t want to, at least a little.”

“Our pack is big enough to protect you. You don’t have to do this. Tell me what you want. ”

“What would a tree want with a fox and wolf?” He skin begins to turn to bark and leaves sprout in his hair. “What would a Nemeton want with such lost souls?”


	6. Chapter 6

**Six.**

Derek wakes on the kitchen floor. He had never left the house. None of them had. Deaton, slumped against the refrigerator, moans as he comes too. They… had still been talking, flushing out formations for their hikein to the Nemeton’s grove. He glances up at stove clock.

They’ve been under for two hours.

It had already known.

“Deaton,” he croaks. His head is throbbing. Alan blinks at him a few times, wincing.

“A hex,” Deaton stammers, “Somewhere in the house - burn it.”

Derek forces himself up. He crawls, half blind with pain pounding in his ears. Confusion blurs his senses. He loses balance. Whatever is doing this, it wants him back down. The other wolves, some of them, seem to be fighting it, but Scott is the only one able to sit up. He’s just as delirious and faultering.

Derek can still hear the Nemeton laughing in his mind, trying to rip him back under. That incessant cackle like thousands of buzzing flies.

He doesn’t know where to look, gropes along the wall - he has to shut his eyes, can’t bear to keep them open. His lids slide closed and there’s the pit of nightmare staring back at him. Just him. Trapped in darkness, in closeness.

Hands on his face.

He tries to get away, but there is nowhere to go, nowhere to run.

_Derek._

He tries to scream and only black bile falls from his mouth.

_DEREK WAKE UP._

A force smacks him so hard he is jolted back into his body. His fingers reflexively close around a weight in his hand. Small animal bones parceled together with hair and feathers. The sickness in head rages still, but he feels clarity returning. Enough to move. _Get up._ Breath garbles out of his lungs as he bursts to his feet. He throws the hex into the kitchen sink and tears apart the cabinets looking for a lighter. He finds a book of matches. They blaze to life, struck against his shoe.

The bones pop and snap, shriveling to smolders.

 

 

Deaton stands on the porch, leaning on the railing post, breathing in the night.

The others are eating inside; Chinese food delivered in fifteen bags by an out of breath teenager too spooked by the looks on their faces to be annoyed at the extra work. None of them know what else to do other than listlessly dig chopsticks into little white boxes. The mass nightmare has made them all brittle, brought them to a quiet place.

This is Melissa’s house. One of the safest buildings in the state. Made of more mountain ash planks and beams and wards than any Derek has ever heard of. Protections put in place by Doctor Deaton himself. Even with a broken ash line, after so many years of strange and occult occurrences, this place had been fortified to be impregnable.

Only a human could have placed the hex, even then it should have been too weak to be dangerous in this house.

It _was_ placed by a human. A human that knew the weaknesses of the McCall house intimately. He had come and gone unseen. He had left no scent. He wasn’t a Spark anymore. He was an Inferno.

“What happened in your dream?” Derek asks.

“Marin appeared to me.” Deaton looks over his shoulder, too tired to say more.

“I think Stiles woke me up,” Derek tells him. He gages the doctor’s reaction. As always, there is none to glimpse.

“Why would he do that?”

No one has said it, but they all know how this came to be. Derek studies the faded paint of the porch.

“I don’t know. I didn’t find the hex. It was in my hand when I came out of it.”

“You fell back asleep?”

He nods, “For a second.”

“Come with me,” Deaton says, palming the car keys from his pocket, “I want to try something.”

“Now?”

“I doesn’t appear that we can afford to waste any time.”

 

Derek’s reflection ripples in the long, narrow tub of ice.  The metal stinks like death.

“You remember how this works?” Deaton asks, rolling up his sleeves.

Derek’s brows harden and Deaton concedes a toothless smile, eyes cast down into the frigid water.

“The Nemeton exists in the plain beyond the Door,” Alan explains, “If Stiles is linked to the Nemeton, if it is truly exaggerating his Spark, then it is plausible that he is able to move in and out of the Door; that he can walk through dreams. There is no knowing how long it will be open. He has appeared to you once and you may still be able to find him in the next realm.”

“Are you strong enough to hold me down?” Derek asks, arms hooked across his chest. He does not veil his skepticism.

“I think I can manage.”

Questioning Deaton’s methods is fruitless, so he does not push the subject. Derek doffs his jacket and Henley, leaving him in a thin, sweat grayed under shirt. He cracks his neck, unable to take his eyes from the patiently waiting bath. He kicks off his sneakers and socks, hands them to Deaton.

The bite is immediate. He ignores it. Standing knee deep in chattering ice he looks Alan over one more time. Then man is unwavering, but it does not inspire confidence.

Water sloughs over him as he sits back, leaning into the freeze. His breath catches as the drink swells over his chest.

“Be careful,” Deaton offers, hands clasping his shoulders.

He shoves Derek under.

 

Coming into the other place, the place beyond the Door, isn’t harsh or staggering. He wakes into it.

Shivering, he sits up in the tub, goose flesh pimpling his skin.

This place looks familiar. He steps out of the bath, water sopping to the floor, rolling off of him in sheets. This is… Mazza’s Pizza. He used to come here every week with his family for Friday night dinner. He revived the tradition for a few months while training his pack. Erica had always asked for peppers on hers just to glare at him as she picked them off.

The restaurant is empty, the dining room reflected back by nighttime darkened windows. Trembling works down his spine and arms. He’s never been so cold. This coldness winds in deeper than his flesh and bone, it’s in his soul, freezing the wolf solid. He’s weak. Nearly human.

Unsure of what to do, he tries the front doors. They rattle as he shakes them. Locked.

“You just got here,” floats a disappointed voice.

Stiles sits in the in one of the booths, his fingers laced over the table. He is not looking at Derek. He… he looks like the day Derek left. Same clothes, same dirt smudges on his face, sun burn on his cheeks. 

Exhaustion pushes he shoulders forward, makes his voice flat.

“You gonna sit?” Fingers disappear in a tangle of hair.

Derek comes to the table. Stiffly, he falls in across from Stiles. He can’t find his smell. This place is off. Unnatural. His wolf, cut off from his senses, unable to move, whines balefully.

“How’d you figure out it wasn’t me?” Stiles asks idly. He’s picking at his fingers, worrying the skin of his cuticles.

“You aren’t cruel. Not even when you’re mad.”

Amber eyes flicker to his.

“How do you know it’s me now?”

“I don’t.”

“Why’d you follow me here?”

“To find out why you did that to us.”

“You deserved it.”

“I did. They didn’t.”

“The Nemeton doesn’t want them interfering. You can’t tell me they weren’t going to. It just wanted to scare them off.”

Derek’s mouth compresses. He doesn’t bring up Stiles coming to him to put an end to the nightmare when he probably could have chosen anyone. He doesn’t dwell on the contradictory delirium of someone pushed so far past grief they have no concept of who they are or what they want.

“Why Mazza’s?” he asks suddenly.

Stiles’ brow lifts softly, “I had this fantasy of you asking me on a horribly, epically awkward date here.” He rests his chin in his hand, eyes dancing around the kitsch and ugly wallpaper and checker board floor. His eyes flash back onto Derek, “This is pretty close, I guess.”

Behind the ragged tear splitting Stiles from the person Derek remembers him to be, there is still a flutter of that unflappable, bold little animal that never backed down from a fight or a challenge.

 “I’m sorry,” Derek tells him. And he wishes there was some arrangement of words more profound, more _anything_ than just ‘I’m sorry’. How could such a social necessity be boiled down to such inadequate wording? The Nemeton's taunt flutters through him and he's helpless to think of anything better, anything that negates the callous portrait he's painted of himself. 

“I believe you,” Stiles says after a beat.

“I should have.”

Stiles’ face quirks in question and he elaborates, “Asked you on an awkward date.”

“I was seventeen,” he points out.

Derek shrugs, looking down to his lap. His ears heat up and he knows they’re red and hates it, but says, “You aren’t now,” anyways. Why does he sound like a heartsick prepubescent? Why does all of it spill out so much cheaper then he means it, if it does at all? 

“I kind of hate you right now, bad-timing-wolf.”

When he looks back up, though, Stiles’ mouth is slightly turned up. Not quite a smile, but certainly not angry.

“Did you hear what I said to the Nemeton?”

“Yeah.”

“It was all true.”

Stiles sits back in the booth, knee bouncing under the table.

“You know I’m choosing to be with the Nemeton, right? I want to help it.”

“Why?”

“It needs me. Even back in high school, you guys never really needed me. Dad did. And I liked being counted on. I liked picking up his prescriptions, making dinner. You know? Like, _mattering_. I don’t care how that sounds. It’s hard to give many fucks at this point.”

“I need you.” It comes out like every horrible romance film he’s ever seen, worse, it’s out before he can get control of himself and stuff it down. It’s the only way he can think to voice the feeling and it’s automatic, a loaded response that’s sat like a coiled spring waiting seven years to trigger.

Stiles snorts air out of his nose. His smile has no levity.

“Want and need are not the same thing, big guy.”

“That’s why I didn’t say want. Thank you for the grammar lesson.”

Stiles’ eyes glimmer; that same light returning to them that always did right before he tried to get a rise out of Derek. It made him look younger.

No.

It made him look his age. Not weary and finished with all that lay before him, but twenty-two and whip smart, cunning like he’d grown into the chasm the fox left behind.

“The old standby. Dick classic."

"Charm seems pointless." 

“With that hairline, it is a little redundant,” Stiles agrees. He scratches the back of his neck, “I won’t apologize for the ice bath, because you look miserable and that tickles me Elmo, but there’s really nothing here. The Nemeton isn’t evil – it’s not good – but it’s not gonna hurt anyone.”

“If you could come with me,” Derek says, “right now, let me bring you back to Scott and Melissa, would you?”

“Don’t be shitty.”

“I wasted five years in the woods alone. It doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t make anything go away. I’m not gonna wait around five more years for you to figure that out.”

“Then go.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“You can’t _make_ me leave it, I’m not _skinny and defenseless_ anymore.” Derek recognizes the words as his own and recoils. He shudders to think what else the Nemeton has shown him.

Derek won’t say it. He won’t say that he’ll never stop trying to break Stiles’ chains. That he doesn’t care whether or not Stiles wants to be shackled. Or if he hates him.

He glares into those eyes. Those haunting fucking eyes. Hate already folding embers into Stiles’ irises. It’ll grow. It’ll blaze.

Derek will tear the world down to around that fucking tree. He’ll burn it back to oblivion before it can drain Stiles’ Spark, use him and bury him. Stiles doesn’t see how this ends. Somehow, he doesn’t see it.

Derek balls his hand in Stiles’ t-shirt, yanks him across the table. Stiles flails, hands whacking the surface for balance. Derek holds him there, close enough to swap breath. That articulated mouth falls open, shuddering a gasp. Warmth rolls off him.

“Why can’t I smell you?” Derek growls, out of frustration. It hasn’t escaped his notice that he hasn’t heard a single heartbeat either.

“Because,” Stiles stammers, “it’s – cheating. Even Scott can practically – read my – mind just from smelling me.”

“Stop blocking it.” Derek gives him a jerk, not enough to hurt him, just enough to get his point across.

“Fuck _off_ ,” Stiles grinds out.

“You worried I’ll smell you lying? Smell the anxiety? The doubt?”

“Don’t like being muzzled?” he spits back.

“You scared I’m gonna make you see what you’ve done to yourself?”

“I don’t – want your help.”

“Tough _shit_.”

He doesn’t need scent to recognize the sheer petulance wafting off Stiles. Like he’ll purposely fight to stay tethered just because he knows Derek doesn’t want him to. God, if he had been born a wolf, he’d have brought them all to their knees. He’d have—

Stiles scrambles on to the table, clambering to his knees, his hands in Derek’s hair, mouth pressed to him so hard it hurts. It takes a second of pause, Derek’s mind filling with white noise, reeling to catch up and when he does he splinters into movement. He wrenches Stiles off the table, arms yanking them flush together, one hand delving between sharp shoulder blades, the other seizing onto his hip. He slams Stiles down onto his back and grinds into him. Mouths a frenzy, too confused and rushed and needing to use any care. Teeth clack and tongs tangle and steaming breath and sweat skate over skin.

He can taste the Spark. The charge worked out over Stiles’ flesh. It’s bitter. All the hair on his body stands on end; every place his skin touches Stiles’ he’s on pins and needles. It’s snaring him in closer, kneading him into a raw nerve.

He’s frantic in a matter of seconds, shaking like a teenager, not sure what he wants to touch first. All of it. Everything. Stiles is hard against his hips. The little noises into his throat grizzle out louder as Derek presses into it, trapping him to the table. And despite how fucked it all is, how this is all wrong, Derek’s coursing with relief that some part of Stiles is still attracted to him this way.

The scent switches on in a clap of force.

Derek almost comes. It washes over him. Bloodoakwildarousalneed _need._ He roughly finds Stile’s throat, the pulse just under his jaw and the thick, viscous pheromones coerce a ragged groan from deep in his chest. Stiles ruts against him at the noise, panting, hips swiveling into him. Derek bites down on his neck and the smell tips his lapping tong, a whisp of sweetness off a bowl of sugar.

“I,” Stiles mewls, “don’t know—,” Derek kisses and nips down his throat and he arches off the table, “if I want to fuck you or get f-fucked. Both prob-ably.”

“ _Shut up_ ,” Derek rasps into his clavicle.

“I, _ah_ , don’t f-forgive you.”

“ _I don’t want you to.”_

Their lips crash back together.

“Jesus, you taste like fucking sex,” Stiles mutters into his mouth. Long, lecherous fingers card into Derek’s hair, claw at his nape. Stiles is a red-faced, sweating mess and it’s devastating and tragic and radiant; he’s staring into the sun. 

“You’re so –,” Derek chokes out.

“You – need to fuck me. Now. Right now.” Nodding like an idiot against his lips, Derek runs both hands up his sides, feeling smooth, damp plains of skin, bunching fabric  –

Derek lurches up, raking in air like he not taken a breath in days. Tepid water crashes out of the tub around him. A coughing fit crumples him over on himself. And Deaton is there suddenly, hands hitched under his armpits, hiking him out of the basin. Weak knees struggle for purchase. He nearly topples them both. Deaton props him against one the counters.

He can’t stop the shaking, the punched out breaths.

Alan returns with towels.

“What happened?” he asks, draping one over Derek's shoulders.

“I – I how-how long?” His mind is fractured, rending apart. Speaking comes in broken gasps, fighting and losing the contention with his trembling.

“You were under for twenty-six hours, Derek. I had to wake you or you wouldn’t have come back at all.”

Light blazes in his eyes as Deaton checks his dilation.

Wouldn’t have come back? He’d have stayed for eternity. Longer.


	7. Chapter 7

**Seven.**

Derek dresses in dry clothes. He moves doggedly, his body waterlogged and aching. He is blank. He goes through motions until he realizes that he has been sitting on the chair in Deaton’s office, one sock balled at the arch of his foot, for ten minutes.

Sleep is a lead crown weighing down heavily. The cross over to the other world has drained him. But also, he has run out of things to feel. Perhaps he feels everything now, he’s buried so far under there is no up or down or sideways.

Talia would tell him to start talking. Let the words tumble, even if they meant nothing, talk until something that felt right fell out. If he starts now he doesn’t know where it will end. He kneels into the silence. Staring at fixed point, losing himself, it’s cathartic even though he knows how it looks on the outside.

Thought dredges on in the background, but what he forces to the front, what he wants to be eaten alive by, is the memory of Stile’s skin slick under his fingers and his eyes, wily and bright and unforgiving.

He doesn’t know how much time has passed when Deaton knocks on the door, glides in.

“What happened, Derek?” he asks gently, folding his arms.

“He doesn’t want to leave,” Derek hears himself reply. He rolls his sock the rest of the way on.

Alan nods somberly, “I believe the Nemeton is reacting to presence of so many spirits. It already feels threatened, regardless of Scott’s intentions to draw the pack together, I believe he inadvertently caused the nightmare.”

This, Derek had unraveled on his own. It just… it didn’t matter.

“He said it doesn’t want us interfering.” A patter of thunder wrinkles his mind. Derek stares at the floor, frowning.

_The Nemeton doesn’t want them interfering. You can’t tell me they weren’t going to. It just wanted to scare them off._

“Derek?” Deaton prods tentatively.

_What would a tree want with a fox and wolf?_

_What would a Nemeton want with such lost souls?_

“ _Them_ ,” Derek whispers, but the word drops out of a whirling stream of thought. It’s the epicenter of storm.

“I don’t think I follow.”

“Did the Nemeton talk to you in your dream?” Derek asks abruptly, meeting the veterinarian’s gaze.

Deaton’s mouth pinches and he says, “My nightmare was a memory. No. I didn’t speak to the Nemeton.”

“And the rest of the pack?”

He sees Alan’s eyes dance as they skip over his question, over what they both know to be the answer and into the next. He asks, “Why would it speak to you and no one else?”

Derek shakes his head, stands. He walks out of the animal clinic without another word.

 

 

He needs sleep. Real sleep. His brain has been crackling for three days, even while his body was dormant.

Not yet. One more place and then he’ll let the encroachment of darkness fold him in. He touches the foreclosure notice on the front door of the Stilinski house. Fireflies bumble across the porch, lighting the lightless windows. No one has lived here in weeks. The notice is dated, but he doesn’t actually know when Stiles disappeared in to the forest. Maybe it was after he saw this, maybe he minced sharp words with the glorified bank teller that put it here.

Whatever transpired, it was long ago. The scents are gone, bleached by rain and time.

Derek breaks the door knob. No power. No alarms. He flicks the light switch experimentally and nothing happens.

He freezes.

There is scent in here.

It’s thin, but it’s recent. Only a couple of hours old. Derek’s eyes ignite, emitting enough soft blue glow to halo his face in the gloom. His nose and his sight meld together as the wolf licks just under the surface. The senses show him a ghostly form, one made of shadows and smoke. It winds up the stairs from the door.

It brushes fingers along the wall as it climbs. Derek feels the plaster in the same place, imagines the steady heartbeat pulsing through finger pads. It rounds the banister lithely. The specter disappears and reappears intermittently as it moves down the corridor.

Leading him.

It goes to Stiles’ room. Derek pushes the door open gently. He has been here before. The furniture may have changed, but the mess of papers and clothing hasn’t and Stiles' smell is everywhere, shimmering in the edges of his things. The figure stands in the middle of the room, wispy and intangible. It is a projection of his quarry's scent, he decides; it's too new to smell so faint. It stares at the door; at him standing in it.

A vaporous arm stretches out to its side, pointing at the desk and the computer on its table top.

Stiles has put more faith in Derek’s problem solving ability than perhaps he should. Coming here had been instinct. This was where it started. This was where he would find whatever was left to be found.

The scent-vision fades and he suppresses the wolf, the glow. He sits at the desk. The chair creaks under him. As the cushions take his weight, flumes of Stiles’ sweat and hair and detergent billow up around him. He flips on the MacBook.

It’s password protected.

He would not have been brought here if he couldn’t parse it together. This is something he would know. Even after five years, after running and denying and cowering in the winter cold wastes, this is something he knows.

He’s a slow typist. Peter called it henpecking. He never had the time or inclination for technology. Certainly after so much time in the wild, he is unpracticed. 

He tries his name. He knows it is too obvious and sentimental. The laptop tells him he is right about his assumption. He flexes his fingers, sits back.

Stiles is too smart to make it something as predictable as his birthday, or anyone’s birthday. Names, places… none of it feels right. He discounts these before even attempting. Derek scrubs his face.

He isn’t a sage. Not like Stiles or Deaton or Lydia. The way their minds work in complicated spirals confounds him. But this is something made for him. He huffs a breath.

The last few years before he left reruns in his head. He looks for anything that stands out in the fever. Nothing seems to fit. Nothing….

He squeezes his eyes closed.

What has this been about since he returned? The Spirit Call. Stiles. The Nemeton.

The Nemeton.

A power so dually benign and malevolent it’s more human than most would think. It wants Stiles. It wants Derek. Wants him so much it spoke to him. Used mortal language and a familiar human face to get him to listen. Tried to trick him.

No.

Not a trick. Tried to test him. See if he could catch the lie. If he was worthy.

_He looks like the day Derek left. Same clothes, same dirt smudges on his face, sun burn on his cheeks._

His fingers tap the keys. His insides agitated with anticipation.

_Do you even remember the last thing you said to me?_

S-A-V-E-H-I-M

The computer opens on the home screen. He’s trembling.

 

 

There’s so much saved here. Years of research projects for the pack. Homework. Reminders. Stiles has more lists of things than anyone should. Lists he makes to help him control the ADD. Derek’s stomach is in painful knots after skimming the first few. They’re of simple things to help him when he’s scattered. Chores broken up into basic, small tasks; how to take apart research, where to start looking, when to take breaks, when to take his Adderall; what to do in the shower, the order of what to wash and when.

Notes about counting to fifty when he’s anxious and counting to one hundred when he starts shaking.

Seeing this manifestation of his illness, when before all there was, was self-deprecating jokes and sarcasm, makes him stand up from the desk. Pace the room a few times. Did the hypervigilance worsen after he left? Did it close him in? Did he remember to take his medicine?

Was he taking it now?

Derek goes to the bathroom in the hall, digs through the cabinets. His nose finds the acrid scent he remembers clinging to Stiles after a stressful day. The bottle is dated recently, within the last month, enough tablets for thirty days of use and it sounds too full when he rattles it. Stiles always kept a few on him, just in case, but he has been in the forest for a long time.

Derek breathes. He shoves the bottle into his pocket, goes back to the computer. He starts clicking through projects dated recently. There has to be something else here, a reason for him to be lead here with Stiles’ scent.

He opens the Bestiary.

Word asks him to pick up where he left off. He clicks the flag and it scrolls through pages and pages and pages until it lands. He knows he can’t read it. But neither can Stiles. Not really. Not without a translator or a key. It doesn’t matter. In the center of the page is his family’s idol. The threefold spiral.

The triskele.

He knows what the pages say. The triskele is many things. It is the unending cycle of nature.

Alpha, beta, omega.

New moon, half moon, full moon.

Birth, life, death. The eternal wheel of existence.

Days before he vanished, Stiles was fixed on this one thing.

But Derek isn’t like Stiles. He hasn’t the capacity to pull the right strings to untangle the web. And he knows it must be obvious. But he’s too exhausted, too frustrated.

He manages to fall into Stiles’ bed. He rolls around in the unkempt sheets and clothing piled on the mattress, breathing deeply, drowning in the scent, marking himself in it. He falls asleep moments later, caught in a twist of bedding.

 

He knows it’s a dream, because he doesn’t remember the beginning or how he got here; the look out under his feet and Beacon Hills glittering in the valley below. This dream is fragile, not at all as solid as the new reality Deaton’s ice bath brought him to. But he is lucid in a way that only happens rarely in dreams. Those sparse occurrences when he wakes up without waking up, when he understands he is asleep and can manipulate the dream around him.

He knows somewhere inside of himself, that being this aware is not of his doing.

He feels eyes on him, but he is alone on the cliff. He waits for something to happen. There is no telling time in this place. It marches on around him disjointedly.

He asks softly, “Why the triskele?”

He feels his answer. It’s not words. It’s thoughts pushed into his own mind. He sees dreams that belong to someone else, to Stiles, given by the Nemeton. It forces to him to relive every moment he encountered the symbol. When he first saw it on Derek’s back, the metal disc from the Hale Vault, each glimpse in between from fragmented half memories. The Nemeton drove him to it, drove him to obsession, but as the images whisk by, faster and faster, it becomes clear that It never explained why.

The barrage ends.

Silence.

“I don’t know what it means either,” he mutters, anger roiling.

“In what world would you have figured it out before me?”

Derek turns from the twinkling city. Stiles is dressed as before, like the day he left, the way he looked at the projection of Mazza’s.

Derek shrugs. “You don’t know what the Nemeton wants?”

Stiles is chewing pensively on his lower lip, eyes low, “It needs me. And,” he makes an annoyed sound, “And now it wants you. But no, it doesn’t say why. Right now it just helps me survive in the woods. It’s pretty boring, actually. Bear Grylls makes it seem way more cool.”

“How much Adderall do you have left?”

Stiles’ mouth quirks, his nose wrinkling and eyes going metallic, “I don’t really know how to react to concerned-Derek. That’s a new one.”

Derek just stares at him until he get a better answer.

“I don’t have any,” he says, guardedly.

“Where are you?”

“Things got a little out of hand last time, that doesn’t mean I wa-,”

Derek crowds him, but he doesn’t back down. It’s there again, the stalwart creature that’s not afraid and too stubborn to be intimidated.

“I know you’re going into withdrawal,” Derek tells him, voice sinking low into his throat. Because these encounters with Stiles, none of them have been real. The dreams and visions are what others want him to see. This version of Stiles five years ago, of a vibrant, younger, healthier picture of himself is a fabrication. Likely a very far cry from reality. 

“It’s none of your fucking-,”

Derek snatches his jaw, holds it in his palm and glowers into Stiles’ eyes.

“When I wake up,” he says, towing his words deliberately, “I’m going to find you. I am not playing games with that tree or you. I’m going to take you home and take care of you. I will rip apart whatever gets in my way. Do you understand?”

Stiles’ face screws up, he twists away and yells, “Really, _really Derek?!_ Now you’re my fucking savior? Is this a joke? Why the hell do you care? WHY THE _FUCK_ DID YOU EVEN LEAVE?”

“BECAUSE I THOUGHT I’D RATHER BE ALONE THAN BE RUINED LOVING YOU.”

The words are hanging icicles, threatening to fall. Stiles stares at him, stormy, breathing hard.

“Except I’m a fucking moron and selfish, and I don’t want to be apart. Being away from you was the worst thing I’ve ever done. I don’t want you to forgive me. Ever. And after you’re safe you can tell me leave and I will, because _that’s_ what I deserve. To leave because you can’t stand me, because _you_ told me to.”

Stiles eyes are wet, but he doesn’t cry. He rakes Derek, stripping him down to his marrow, so angry and hurt and terrified it’s agonizing to witness.

He gives up.

Derek sees the struts break inside of him. This isn’t real, but he feels the shift in emotion around them. It didn’t take much, because Stiles _can’t_ lie to himself.

“I-,” Stiles croaks, the hard edges crumbling off his features. His mouth works for a moment and then in a broken puff of air, “I wanna go home.”

Nodding, Derek steps to him immediately and Stiles sags against his chest, arms locking around his shoulders.

“Ok,” Derek whispers into his hair, dabbing kisses lightly over his temple. When Stiles kisses him this time, huge sad eyes look up at him and it’s not panicked, not urgent. Breath shudders out of him hotly as their mouths lap softly over each other. Derek cradles the back of his head and lifts him so that the toes of his sneakers scarcely scrape the fallen foliage.

“I missed you so much you fucking douche,” Stiles mumbles into his neck.

“You’ll be lucky to take a shit by yourself at this point." 

“Hale with the setup,” but he's too tired to take a shot at Derek's choice of phrasing. 

Derek sets him down, and nuzzles his pulse point, runs his tong over it because he can’t help himself, even if this isn’t real. Stiles grips his arms, just under the ball of his shoulder, and gasps.

“Tell me where you are and I’ll come get you,” he whispers into his skin. It puckers under his mouth as his suckles gingerly.

“I feel like – if I don’t answer, you’ll keep doing – that.” Stiles straddles himself on Derek’s thigh and unabashedly grinds against it.

“I’ll do more when I find you,” he purrs. 

“ _Jesus_ ," comes a hissed response. 

Derek feels a smirk tug the corner of his mouth and his nips Stiles’ neck a little harder, and grips the cleft of his ass, pulling Stiles firm against his thigh. The resulting cry is accidental, because they’re both over stimulated as is the nature of dreams. Stiles comes against him and sounds so shocked by it, is so fevered by the abrupt release, that the dream quakes around them.

Stiles loses focus, can’t hold the fabric of this place together.

Stiles vanishes and the dream disintegrates and Derek springs up in bed, covered in sweat and panting. Disorientation wicks up his spine. He fights to recover his senses, tries to remember where he is. His crotch is pinched painfully against the seam of his jeans. He fights half-consciously to down his button and zipper and he comes as soon as he touches himself, so hard he loses a few seconds and crashes back on the mattress.


	8. Chapter 8

**Eight.**

He had not got Stiles’ location out of him in the dream. He’d been – distracted, when he should have been in control. Stiles made him irrational, left him spinning dervishes, trying to catch up and now he was no closer than before.

He balls a bunch of clothing under one arm, most of it from the hamper, anything that’s been worn and discarded, and storms out of the house.

 

They pass shirts and jeans around among the wolves on Scott’s lawn. Some of the omegas rub a hoody, one that must be particularly well worn for the scent to be so strong, on their cheeks and chins. They aren’t so familiar with Stiles’ smell, so Derek can withstand a little scent marking if it means finding him faster.

“I almost thought you’d taken off again,” Scott says idly, watching the pack, “Deaton didn’t tell me where you were at until yesterday.”

Derek’s brow raises in question.

“He’s been following leads on the Nemeton. I guess we still don’t really know much about it.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Derek grunts.

“You have a plan?”

“Find Stiles.”

“Right, but, I mean, the Nemeton won’t just let him leave.”

“Deaton said it can’t force him to serve. He doesn’t want to stay.”

“How do you know that again?” Scott asks. His description of the vision in the other world and the dream had been scant. He didn’t understand how it worked any more than he could explain it to Scott. Scott also had trouble with Stiles not appearing in his dreams at all.

Derek knew the answer, but it didn’t seem his place to explain it. Stiles had attacked his best friend, given into the Nemeton’s chaos, he’d chosen It over Scott. No matter what had transpired between them leading to that point, Stiles would not forgive himself for turning on his brother like that. Would not be able to face him.

Their circumstances could not have been further apart. If anything, Scott should have taken Stiles' absence as a good thing. It was grief and loneliness that brought Stiles to Derek. Someone he could hate more than he hated himself. Someone he could find creature comfort in without consequences. What had gone on between them wasn't romance. Derek had gleaned enough from past lessons to know the difference between using someone as a release and loving them. But that was what Stiles needed him to be and at least this time he could _choose_ to be it. 

Scott just had to come with him. They had to hunt Stiles down together. The rest would settle itself once Scott and Stiles had each other again.

“He told me,” Derek says simply, and then shouts, “Pair off! You’re going to spread out through the Preserve. If you find Stiles, howl and we’ll all come running. Understand?”

 

His smell was hidden before because his didn’t want to be found. It sings faintly now, leaves ghostly spatters on the leaves. Scott and Derek pick up on it first, they know it better than any of the others, even with the aids. It’s branded on them.

It mixes with the Spark, the scent of ozone, of a coming storm. They’re soon sprinting through rushes and scrub.

They erupt in the Nemeton’s grove. Kira is close behind with Isaac on her heels, they hit the grove from the adjacent side and the world comes screaming to a standstill. 

Stiles, bent on one knee, bent like he’s shouldering immense weight, is before the massive stump of the Nemeton. His hand thrusts out to Kira and Isaac and he shouts, “Stop!”

The air ripples. A blast of force shoots from his palm and they fly back into a thicket.

Crimson lines trace his skin, the lines of his Spark being called out by the Nemeton. He’s thin, too thin, and pale, bruise like shadows under strained eyes, patchy scruff shading his jaw. His clothes are filthy, everything about him, is masked by forest ichor. Derek had known it would be worse when he finally found him in person, but nothing could have prepared him for this. He lurches toward the stump, not sure what he should do, but knowing he has to do something - 

Scott sways beside him. Derek fumbles to catch him when he faints. Panic bubbles at the base of Derek’s neck. He’s scrambling to understand. Jackson makes a run at the grove and gets two steps before his visage goes slack and his crumbles to the ground.

_It doesn’t want them interfering._

“Stiles!” Derek yells.

“ _Get them away_!” he stammers. His fingers wrap one of the Nemeton’s huge roots. It clacks into place. It had warned him. It had told him to keep the others away. Stiles was doing this, forcing them to sleep, pushing them back, because the Nemeton only gives one warning.

Derek falls into the True Shift.

What has he done? He should have waited, should have thought, but it’s too late. The wolf surges forward. He pounds over the ground, to the first scent as it grows closer. Malia tries to break the tree line and he slams into her. She careens into a tree trunk, but is on her feet in the next instant, snarling wildly.

His hackles raise as he roars back. She whines, curling away. And he takes off again having abated her. He tears them down one at a time, wrestling to the dirt, clamping jaws into scruff and shaking.

Cora stops short when she sees him. She scents his fear and it doesn't take words to make her understand. She darts in the opposite direction to cut off the others, the ones Derek knows he can't get to. He flies over downed log and into Ethan. 

Ethan throws him into a tree, knocking the wind out of his lungs, but he can’t stop. He heaves himself up. Ethan, confused, angry, grapples with him, giant and strong, smashing Derek’s head into the ground. Razor claws strip his sides. Blood wells, mats his fur, makes him dizzy. It doesn’t matter. Ethan launches at him, tearing him back down. Something cracks and his vision goes white and he can’t suck in air – until one of the omegas rips Ethan off.

An omega of all wolves would be the first to break up a fight. Even without knowing either of them well, her senses, her empathy, pries apart Derek’s actions, understands that he’s stopping them not hurting them. She’s slight, but wrangles Ethan in to a head lock regardless, working his momentum and leverage against him until he stops fighting.

Derek hobbles away.

He can’t… breathe. He’s healing, right? He’s… he collapses in the grove. The wolf leaves him, whimpering and retreating into darkness. Pain blossoms over every inch of his body. He’s not healing. He feels the fractures in his ribs, the thick heat of he own blood running from torn skin. He's drowning under the weight of a crushed chest. 

Stiles skids down beside him. He looks awful. His lips are chapped and his cheeks sunken. Derek tugs in breath as hard as he can, determined to breathe, to keep his promise, to take Stiles home, but he gags. Blood hocks in his throat and he coughs it up.

Stiles’ hands are on his face, “Derek? Derek, stay awake!”

Fingers in his hair. He loves that feeling. He imagines Stiles combing fingers through his hair while he sleeps, waking up to him absently petting. Sunlight on his face, warm and tangled up, listening to Stiles’ steadily drumming heart. He can hear that heart now, it’s fast, like that first time he caught Stiles and Scott on his family’s land, wide eyed with guilt. He grins at the memory.

“Why aren’t you healing?” Stiles murmurs frantically above him. He’s trying to sop up the blood as it gushes out of the jagged claw marks Ethan left on him.

It’s ok. He’s ok.

It doesn’t hurt.

He touches Stiles’ chin, drawing his eyes. He just wants to see those eyes. They’re reddening when they meet him and watery.

“Are you fucking – joking,” Stiles barks a little hysterically, “You’re dying? All this and you’re fucking dy-,” he can’t breathe either. His heart is so fast, a stamping drill. 

Derek’s voice is deflated when it pushes out of him. It sounds wet. He doesn’t care. He says what you needs to, what he should have every day, any chance he got.

He heaves, “…love you.”

“Fuck off,” Stiles snaps, “don’t fucking say that. Don’t say that just because you’re dying. Jesus – fuck this.”

Stiles climbs on top of him, straddling his stomach, setting off every injury and Derek convulses under the pressure. Stiles’ hands hover over his heart, stacked over each other. The crimson markings glimmer.

“Derek Hale if you die right now I will _fucking_ _kill you_!” he growls, growls like a wolf would. His eyes squeeze together.

A noise beyond noise trembles the grove. A sound so big and dark Derek feels it more than hears it. Sparks of white hot lightening spider over Stiles' palms. The energy radiates up his arms, ignites his veins like struck magnesium. Derek’s hands constrict around Stiles’ hips as his body seizes. The world goes out from under him.

He is out of air.

He is out of time.

 

He is vaguely aware of being moved. Of shouting. Shadows gallop across his vision and stars too. He can breathe again. Shallowly, but he can breathe and it’s all he can do until he gives into the flood of inky black. He’s gone.

 

His body is heavy. He knows he should be in pain. Maybe he is. Maybe it’s there scratching the door to his mind, but it’s blocked off. He can’t think. He stops trying.

 

When he wakes up he is staring up at the familiar exposed lines of his bedroom ceiling. Cotton clouds his mind, makes him sluggish. But he recognizes the beams above him, exposed oak he spent a week on his back refinishing.

His loft.

How…?

“I’mdreaming,” he slurs. His mouth is full of marbles. Everything is so… unresponsive. Why isn’t he more afraid?

“That’s super flattering, but no, big guy, not this time.”

He registers then that he is not alone. Drowsy connections fire off until he feels the dip in the mattress beside him. Stiles’ hands appear in front of him, he wiggles ten fingers.

His hands are beautiful.

“What’sss wrong withme?”

“You may or may not have three times the legal limit of morphine in your system.”

Derek frowns, eyes sliding closed, trying to will the fog away, “I can’t gethigh.”

“You can if the Nemeton siphons off almost all of your wolfy healing powers.”

“What?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

Derek struggles to focus on him. Stiles slowly comes into alignment, but he’s fuzzy and shiny around the edges. He’s clean, still unshaven, still haggard, eyes rimmed in scarlet and dark purple, but he’s in new clothes and smells like soap. Someone has seen to the small cuts on his face and arms.

Alarm courses through Derek and he tries to sit up, which he immediately regrets as vertigo perches along his spinal column. Stiles’ pushes his shoulders back down gently.

“Easy,” he mutters, concern and tension in his voice.

“You’re medicine-,” Derek manages through a clenched jaw, “itsin my –,” in his what? He knows he has it. He knows. Somewhere –

“I already took it,” Stiles says tightly. He doesn’t like talking about it. Not seriously. Not like it’s a weakness.

“You’re ok?”

“Yeah, I’m fine. Tired and really, _really_ hungry, but fine.”

“Good,” and the fight goes out of him. Stiles is ok. He’s home. Derek lets his eyes fall closed.

“Sleep it off,” he hears Stiles say quietly. And the words are subdued and tender and almost sound like Talia.

“Could you,” Derek starts, but his mouth is so dry and his swallows hard on what feels like nothing but paper, “petmy hair.”

A chuckle chuffs out somewhere above him.

“You cannot even imagine how much shit you are going to get for this later you giant, scary man.”

Stiles hunkers down closer to him, balancing an arm on his chest. Fingers brush through his hair, stroking up and down across his crown like an easy tide. He loses himself in the rhythm and the scent of blood and oak and wild that drapes over him.

Safe. Home.


	9. Chapter 9

**Nine**.

 

The Nemeton had wanted them. It had needed their spirits entwined, unbreakable. It had played them off each other as easily as it would marionettes; pulling the right strings at the right times.

It was very old, an eternal being as patient as water and Deaton suggests that it may have been planning this for a very, very long time. Derek refuses to think of it that way. Hates it. He keeps trying to understand in mortal terms, but mortal terms are nothing to a creature as vast as the imagination.

And now it was gone.

Dead.

Deaton reminds them that the Nemeton was energy; that energy cannot die, it simply becomes something else. And it has. It drove Stiles to the edge, filled with more Spark than he could handle, prodding at his grief and fears until he attacked Scott. Killed Chris Argent under its influence. Triggered the Spirit Cry. And so the dominos fell.

Each event orchestrated with godlike precision until it ended with Derek fighting his way through the grove. Felling his pack to save them from a false threat, fighting like a wolf that knew it would heal, taking more damage than any other creature would, especially to protect its family, its mate.

But he hadn’t healed.

He had died.

And Stiles had done what Stiles always does. He brought Derek back. To bring a soul back from beyond the Door meant trading every ounce of viable life force around him. The Nemeton’s grove had been barren before. Now it is a wasteland, all of it sucked dry; nothing but listless, ashen husks and the brittle bones of animals and trees. Stiles had altered the flow of life in the forest, he had moved earth and sky and drained the Nemeton down to last drop of its Spark.

It was returned to the earthly wheel of destruction and creation. An infinite being, wounded and alone and tired, finally allowed to rest, to become something more.

_Birth, life, death._

It had joined the flame kindling Derek’s spirit and when he died, it would move back into the ground, live, die and live again in the way of all things.

The pack listens intently. Even Scott nods, though Derek is certain he’s got absolutely no hold on what Alan is painstakingly attempting to explain. Kira pats Scott’s hand, because she too knows he’s lost.

Stiles is making a point of not meeting anyone’s gaze as Deaton talks and their gazes do flicker on him occasionally. He doesn't want to talk. Not to anyone. He had been snared in Scott's fierce embrace a couple of hours ago, but that, so far, is the only contact he's permitted himself. 

He’s been eating nonstop since Derek was finally able to climb out of bed. It’s part nerves, part withdrawal from his medicine and part recovery from wielding so much Spark. He’s on his third burrito, Chipotle bags and wrappers strewn about around him where he is sat cross legged on the floor.

He glances at Derek when he feels him looking. Mouth full, he makes a sort of embarrassed, laughing, choking noise and forces it down. Rice and pico de gallo stick to the corners of his mouth. 

He looks like himself. Not a mirage of what he was, or ruined by Spark and grief.

In this moment, Derek doesn’t care about the Nemeton or what he’s done. He will have always made these mistakes. Nothing will change it. He will make more mistakes. So will they all.

Maybe it’s how they move past it that matters.

 

The waitress sets two pints on their table in chilled mugs. It’s cheap beer, which seems completely pointless to drink, especially for someone like Derek.

“Your order’ll be outta the oven soon, guys,” she says sweetly and skips away to her next table.

“Are you old enough to drink that?” Derek asks.

Stiles, swallows a swig, wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, makes a finger gun and winks.

“You know this does nothing to me,” adds Derek, as he forces the swill down.

“It’s a good thing this isn’t your awkward high school date fantasy then.”

“What exactly happens in it?”

Stiles’ pint is down to half. He sits back, face turning thoughtful. “Since it’s a fantasy, I don’t get heartburn after too much beer and pizza and none of it gets on my face or in my teeth. I smell like a fucking rose through the whole thing. You tell me about your hobbies and shit, because that’s polite date conversation and I actively try not to jump your bones.”

Derek’s mouth tugs up in one corner.

“Also I find the strength not to loudly berate you over having never seen Star Wars; like seriously, what the fuck is up with every single werewolf and their severe Trilogy allergies?”

“I’ve seen Star Wars.”

Stiles leans across the table, eyes like steel, “ _What_?”

Derek shrugs, “I saw the originals when I was a kid. There was a revival at the theatre downtown. And I didn’t really mind Phantom Menace, because of the score and the fight choreography, but the rest were terrible.”

Stiles continues to stare at him. “ _Are you serious_?”

“Always.”

The rest of Stiles’ beer disappears down his gullet and he smacks the glass back down. “I don’t know why I’m angry, but I’m angry. And really turned on.”

“That sounds like a Stiles problem.”

Stiles levels his index finger at him, “We’re gonna eat this pizza in a very fast, very undignified way and then I’m going to ravage you, Hale. Are we kowabunga on this?”

Derek’s grin grows, red flaring up in his cheeks and ears. He raises a hand vaguely and shrugs again signaling his concession.

“When you’re done ravaging,” he says, little more seriously, “I'd like it if you stayed.”

Stiles snorts a laugh and the sarcasm follows, “Really? No pretending to sleep and money on the dresser?”

“I didn’t mean for the night.”

Stiles blinks. It doesn’t take long for his exceptionally quick mind to catch up. Maybe for the first time in his entire life, he is speechless. He gapes at Derek with faint shock.

“I know you probably don’t mind living with Scott and Melissa, but if you want some space, I made up the guest room, or you can sleep with me. It doesn’t have to be permanent. You can come and go if you want. I won’t be offended.”

Derek remembers the set of keys he had cut and digs them out of his pocket, sets them on the table. Stiles fixes on them where they unassumingly sit; little pieces of shiny, unused brass.

Trust won’t come immediately. But it will come. He has to have faith that it will, that one day it will be permanent. Until then he’ll leave himself exposed. Open, and waiting to be needed.

Tentatively, Stiles takes the keys. He looks them over in his fingers.

“…Ok,” he rasps. He looks terrified. There’s no way to impress on him that he doesn’t have to be. At least not with words. He just has to see and Derek will show him.

“You have foam on your lip,” Derek says and leans across the table. Stiles kisses him back, hands holding his jaw, pressing the keys to his cheek.

“Liar,” Stiles mutters, smiling against his mouth.

“Never.”

**Author's Note:**

> Companion fic written from Stiles' POV: [Enlighten](http://archiveofourown.org/works/6391183)
> 
> It's been a rough year, hence the depressing overtones. Hope you enjoyed!
> 
> You can find fanart/garbage on ye olde tumblr [here](http://bandaran.tumblr.com/)


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